Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse, in full Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse, (born December 31, 1869, Le Cateau, Picardy, France—died November 3, 1954, Nice), artist often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. He was the leader of the Fauvist movement about 1900, and he pursued the expressiveness of colour throughout his career. His subjects were largely domestic or figurative, and a distinct Mediterranean verve presides in the treatment.

Formative years

Matisse, whose parents were in the grain business, displayed little interest in art until he was 20 years old. From 1882 to 1887 he attended the secondary school in Saint-Quentin; after a year of legal studies in Paris, he returned to Saint-Quentin and became a clerk in a law office. He began to sit in on an early-morning drawing class at the local École Quentin-Latour, and, in 1890, while recovering from a severe attack of appendicitis, he began to paint, at first copying the coloured reproductions in a box of oils his mother had given him. Soon he was decorating the home of his grandparents at Le Cateau. In 1891 he abandoned the law and returned to Paris to become a professional artist.

Although at this period he had, in his own words, “hair like Absalom’s,” he was far from being a typical Left Bank bohemian art student. “I plunged head down into work,” he said later, “on the principle I had heard, all my young life, expressed by the words ‘Hurry up!’ Like my parents, I hurried up in my work, pushed by I don’t know what, by a force which today I perceive as being foreign to my life as a normal man.” This 19th-century gospel of work, derived from a middle class, northern French upbringing, was to mark his entire career, and soon it was accompanied by a thoroughly bourgeois appearance—gold-rimmed spectacles; short, carefully trimmed beard; plump, feline body; conservative clothes—which was odd for a leading member of the Parisian avant-garde.

Matisse did not, however, become a member of the avant-garde right away. In 1891, in order to prepare himself for the entrance examination at the official École des Beaux-Arts, he enrolled in the privately run Académie Julian, where the master was the strictly academic William-Adolphe Bouguereau. That Matisse should have begun his studies in such a conservative school may seem surprising, and he once explained the fact by saying that he was acting on the recommendation of a Saint-Quentin painter of hens and poultry yards. But it must be remembered that he himself was for the moment a provincial with tastes that were old-fashioned in a Paris already familiar with the Post-Impressionism of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. His earliest canvases are in the 17th-century Dutch manner favoured by the French Realists of the 1850s.

In 1892 Matisse left the Académie Julian for evening classes at the École des Arts Décoratifs and for the atelier of the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts, without being required to take the entrance examination. Moreau, a tolerant teacher, did not try to impose his own style on his pupils but rather encouraged them to develop their personalities and to learn from the treasures in the Louvre. Matisse continued, with some long interruptions, to study in the atelier until 1899, when he was forced to leave by Fernand Cormon, an intolerant painter who had become the professor after Moreau’s death. After that, although he was nearing 30, he frequented for a time a private academy where intermittent instruction was given by the portraitist Eugène Carrière.

In 1896 Matisse exhibited four paintings at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and scored a triumph. He was elected an associate member of the Salon society, and his Woman Reading (1894) was purchased by the government. From this point onward he became increasingly confident and venturesome, both as an artist and as a man. During the next two years he undertook expeditions to Brittany, met the veteran ImpressionistCamille Pissarro, and discovered the series of Impressionist masterpieces in the Gustave Caillebotte Collection, which had just been donated—amid protests from conservatives—to the French nation. His colours became, for a while, lighter in hue and at the same time more intense. In 1897 he took his first major step toward stylistic liberation and created a minor scandal at the Salon with The Dinner Table, in which he combined a Pierre-Auguste Renoir kind of luminosity with a firmly classical composition in deep red and green.

In 1898 he married a young woman from Toulouse, Amélie Parayre, and left Paris for a year, visiting London, where he studied the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, and working in Corsica, where he received a lasting impression of Mediterranean sunlight and colour.

Revolutionary years

During 1898 Paul Signac, the theoretician and actively proselytizing leader (after the death of Georges Seurat) of the Neo-Impressionists, or pointillists, published in the literary review La Revue Blanche his principal manifesto, “D’Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionnisme.” Matisse, back in Paris in 1899, read the articles and, without turning into an immediate convert, became interested in the pointillist idea of obtaining additive mixtures of colour on the retina by means of juxtaposed dots (points in French) on the canvas. He furthered his research into new techniques by buying, from the well-known modernist dealer Ambroise Vollard, a painting by Cézanne, The Three Bathers; one by Gauguin, Boy’s Head; and a drawing by van Gogh. Often accompanied by his close friend Albert Marquet, who was also interested in the problem of pure colour, he began to paint outdoor scenes in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in suburban Arcueil, and from the open window of his apartment overlooking the Seine.

Matisse also purchased from Vollard the plaster model of the bust of Henri Rochefort by Auguste Rodin, and during 1899 he began to attend an evening class in sculpture. His early work in three dimensions, the first of some 60 pieces he executed during his lifetime, reveals the influence not only of Rodin but also of Antoine-Louis Barye, generally considered the greatest French sculptor of animals.

After 1899 Matisse ceased to exhibit at the Salon and gradually became a familiar figure in the Parisian circles where modern art was being produced and ardently discussed. In 1901 he showed for the first time in the juryless, eclecticSalon des Indépendants, which had been founded in 1884 as a refuge for painters unacceptable to the official exhibition juries. In 1902 he was in a group show at the small gallery of Berthe Weill, and the next year he and a number of his old classmates from Moreau’s atelier and the Académie Carrière were the progressive contingent in the liberal, newly created Salon d’Automne. But in spite of such recognition, he was often on the brink of financial disaster. In 1900 he was obliged to accept work on the decoration of the Grand Palais, which was being erected to house part of the new Exposition Universelle in the Champs-Élysées quarter. His wife opened a dress shop in the hope of helping to make ends meet. In 1901 an attack of bronchitis forced him to take a long rest. During part of 1902 he had to return to Bohain with his three children—Marguerite, Jean, and Pierre—and Mme Matisse. He was past 34 when, in June 1904, at Vollard’s gallery, he had his first one-man show, and it was a failure.

Matisse spent the summer of 1905 with André Derain at Collioure, a small French fishing port on the Mediterranean, near the Spanish border. In the dazzling sunshine he rapidly freed himself from what he called “the tyranny” of pointillism. The carefully placed little dabs required by the additive-mixture approach turned into swirls and slabs of spontaneous brushwork, and the theoretically realistic colours exploded into an emotional display of complementaries: red against green, orange against blue, and yellow against violet. Representative of this new freedom were Open Window, Collioure, which was finished at Collioure, and Woman with Hat, a portrait of his wife painted back in Paris in September. That fall the two pictures were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne alongside works by a number of artists who also had been experimenting with violent colour. The Paris critic Louis Vauxcelles called the group les fauves (“the wild beasts”), and thus Fauvism, the first of the important “isms” in 20th-century painting, was born. Almost immediately Matisse became its acknowledged leader.

Almost immediately, too, his financial situation altered for the better. The Stein family in Paris—Gertrude, her brothers Leo and Michael, and the latter’s wife, Sarah—became Matisse collectors. In 1906 the artist had a show at the Galerie Druet in Paris in addition to exhibiting again at the Salons des Indépendants and d’Automne. In 1907 a group of admirers, who included Sarah Stein and Hans Purrmann, organized for him a Left Bank art school, in which he taught off and on until 1911. In 1908 he exhibited in New York City, Moscow, and Berlin.

Fauvism was too undisciplined to last long, and soon its adherents were moving, according to their temperaments, toward Expressionism, Cubism, or some kind of neo-traditionalism. Matisse had no liking for these directions, and if “Fauve” is taken to mean simply a painter with a passion for pure colour, he can be said to have remained one all his life. He had, however, too much rationalism in his outlook not to wish for some order in a stylistic situation that threatened to become chaotic, and his search for chromatic equilibrium and linear economy can be followed in a series of major works produced between the revelation of Fauvism in 1905 and the end of World War I. In 1906 he painted Joy of Life; in 1908, Red Room (Harmony in Red); in 1911, The Red Studio; in 1915, Goldfish; in 1916, Piano Lesson; and in 1918, Montalban, Large Landscape.

In such works, the list of which should be much longer, the main characteristics of Matisse’s mature painting style recur constantly. The forms tend to be outlined in flowing, heavy contours and to have few interior details; the colour is laid on in large, thin, luminous, carefully calculated patches; shadows are practically eliminated; and the depicted space is either extremely shallow or warped into a flatness that parallels the plane of the canvas and defies academic rules for perspective and foreshortening. The total effect, although too intense and freehand to be merely decorative, may recall the patterns of the rugs, textiles, and ceramics of the Islamic world. The choice and treatment of subject matter imply optimism, hedonism, intelligence, a fastidious sensuality, and, in spite of the many studies of both clothed and unclothed women, scarcely a trace of conventional sentiment.

Riviera years

In 1912 Matisse’s sculpture was on view in New York City and his painting in both Cologne and London. In 1913 he was represented by 13 pictures in the much-discussed, much-lambasted New York Armory Show, and, when the exhibition arrived in Chicago, he was given some useful publicity by the burning—happily, merely in effigy—of his Blue Nude (1907). But middle age, growing affluence, an established international reputation, the disruptions of World War I, and a distaste for public commotion gradually combined to isolate him from the centres of avant-gardism. He began to winter on the French Riviera, and by the early 1920s he was mostly a resident of Nice or its environs. His pictures became less daring in conception and less economical in means. Like many of the painters and composers during these years (notably Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky), Matisse relaxed into a modernized sort of classicism. Such typically Nice-period works as the Odalisque with Magnolias (1923–24) and Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background (1925–26), however, are masterpieces that deserve their popularity.

Matisse, Henri: TeaTea, oil on canvas by Henri Matisse, 1919; in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 140.34 × 211.3 cm.Photograph by Beesnest McClain. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, bequest of David L. Loew in memory of his father, Marcus Loew, M.74.52.2

Matisse, Henri: Bathers by a RiverCurators and scientists collaborating to colourize a black-and-white photograph, taken in 1913, that shows an unfinished version of Henri Matisse's Bathers by a River.Courtesy of Northwestern University

Prosperity did not make Matisse less industrious. In 1920 he did the sets and costumes for Serge Diaghilev’s production of the ballet Le Chant du Rossignol. He returned to sculpture, which he had neglected for several years, and by 1930 he had completed his fourth and most nearly abstract version of The Back, a monumental female nude in relief, on which he had been working at intervals since 1909. He relaxed, as he had always done, by traveling: to Étretat, on the coast of Normandy, in 1921; to Italy in 1925; and to Tahiti, by way of New York City and San Francisco, in 1930. During 1933 he visited Venice and Padua, and in Merion, Pennsylvania, he completed and installed the final version of his large muralThe Dance II, which was commissioned by Albert C. Barnes for the Barnes Foundation.

Matisse, Henri: Decorative Figure on an Ornamental BackgroundDecorative Figure on an Ornamental Background, oil painting by Henri Matisse, 1925–26; in the National Museum of Modern Art, Paris.S.P.A.D.E.M., Paris/V.A.G.A., New York City, 1985; photograph, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Matisse had been interested in etching, drypoint, lithography, and allied printmaking techniques since his first years in Paris and had produced a number of occasional prints. In 1932 he had published, as illustrations for an edition of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poésies, 29 etchings, in which his talent for supple contours and linear economy was subtly attuned to the “purity of means” evident in the poems. After the outbreak of World War II, he became increasingly active as a graphic artist, notably with his illustrations for Henry de Montherlant’s Pasiphaé (published in 1944), Pierre Reverdy’s Visages (1946), the Lettres portugaises (1946), Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (1947), Pierre de Ronsard’s Florilège des Amours (1948), and Charles d’Orléans’ Poèmes (1950). Along with these books in mostly black and white techniques, he published Jazz (1947), a book consisting of his own reflections on art and life, with brilliantly coloured illustrations made by a technique he called “drawing with scissors”: the motifs were pasted together after being cut out of sheets of coloured paper (hand-painted with gouache in order to get the desired hue).

During the last years of his life, he was a rather solitary man who was separated from his wife and whose grown-up children were scattered. After 1941, when he underwent an operation for an intestinal disorder, he was bedridden much of the time; after 1950 he suffered from asthma and heart trouble. Cared for by a faithful Russian woman who had been one of his models in the early 1930s, he lived in a large studio in the Old Hôtel Regina at Cimiez, overlooking Nice. Often he was obliged to work on his mural-sized projects from a studio bed with the aid of a crayon attached to a long pole. But there are no signs of flagging creative energy or of sadness in his final achievements. On the contrary, these works are among the most daring, most accomplished, and most serenely optimistic of his entire career.

At Vence, a Riviera hill town where Matisse had a villa from 1943 to 1948, he completed in 1951, after three years of planning and execution, his Chapelle du Rosaire for the local Dominican nuns, one of whom had nursed him during his nearly fatal illness in 1941. He had begun by agreeing to design some stained-glass windows, had gone on to do murals, and had wound up by designing nearly everything inside and outside, including vestments and liturgical objects. Before the chapel was finished, he was at work on the huge coloured-paper cutouts—amplifications of what he had done in the illustrations for Jazz—that made him in many respects the “youngest” and most revolutionary artist of the early 1950s. He died in 1954.